Die-hard Super Fans Take Fandom To The Next Level

Alix Boyle

You've probably seen him on TV or in the newspaper, wearing a blue and white wig decorated with the fuzzy dice equivalent of basketballs. He's Danny Karwoski, the University of Connecticut women's basketball superfan.

Karwoski has attended upward of 25 games a season for more than decade. Back in December, he already had his flight booked for Tennessee to attend the Final Four and predicted in January that the UConn women will win the championship. Why would a mild-mannered father of two spend his time, energy and money this way?

"It's fun," he said with a shrug before the sold-out game against Temple University back in January. "They are the best and they are Connecticut."

Unlike some fans who spend $25,000 to $30,000 a season on their, um, hobby, Karwoski said he likes to hunt for bargains for air travel and hotels and figures he only spends about $6,000 a season.

UConn fans do not just attend games. They toil away online writing for a sports blog called The Boneyard. Tere, you can get stats, links to all the news stories about UConn women's basketball (and men's basketball and football) games, detailed analysis of a past game or predictions about an upcoming game.

Super-fans, whether their team is UConn, Yale, the Yankees or the Giants, put a lot of time and effort into their hobby. In fact, sometimes there are more UConn fans at away games than there are fans for the home team. Crazy.

Adam Earnheardt, a professor of communication at Youngstown State University in Ohio and a sports fandom and social media researcher says obsession with a favorite team is "prosocial," or can be a good thing.

Like Karwoski, most college and professional teams have one or two ultimate fans that really stand out. They devote much of their lives, and some real money, to the team including buying tickets, travel, jerseys, makeup and wigs.

"They do that because their…identity is focused on the success of that team," Earnhardt said. "For a lot of people there is this need to feel 'eustress' or euphoric stress, a term coined by Alan Rubin at Kent State. It's a release whenever you are watching a game and you are screaming and you're feeling that excitement. You are expecting that and you want to feel that way again because of what it felt like before. It's a sense of achievement. You live vicariously through your favorite team. When they succeed you succeed."

Karowski said he began following the UConn women during the Rebecca Lobo era, the 1994-95 season.

"It's great family entertainment; there's less swearing than at the men's games," said Karwoski, a landscaper from Stamford.

"It drove me nuts to stay home and watch it on TV, so I started going to the games." Gradually, his sons, now 21 and 23, joined him and try to outshout their dad, who often leads the team cheer. (You know, "UConn!, Huskies, UConn, Huskies, UConn, Huskies, woof!) And wife, Lisa, sits beside her husband, wig and all.

"I do think he's nuts, but it's fun," Lisa Karwoski said. "And it's inspiring. The UConn women's team is not just a nice group of girls, but they're all scholar athletes."

With the increasing use of social media, fans are expressing themselves even more to a national and international audience and even influencing the choices teams make, said Earnhardt who is the editor of the academic book, "Sports Fans, Identity, and Socialization: Exploring the Fandemonium," Lexington Books, 2013.

Teams can get instant feedback about decisions they've made on Twitter and Facebook. If they change their logo, or let a favorite player go, fans will debate it online, Earnhardt said.

"Fans are influencing the decisions of the professional sports organization," Earnhardt said. "The fan is the consumer. But it can be dangerous if you let fans run every decision your team is making. If every time you went to fire a coach you responded to what the fans want, then you are relying on people who don't have the best knowledge about the sport. Even though fans are passionate, they are not necessarily properly informed."

Twitter, Facebook and the like also enable fans to root for their favorite teams even if they are transferred away from home to Bejing, Houston or anywhere in between.

Quinnipiac University's D.G. Brian Jones is both a marketing expert and an avid Quinnipiac ice hockey fan, giving him an informed perspective on why fans behave as they do. As we all know, Quinnipiac made it to the Frozen Four (NCAA final) last year causing a frenzy of high-fiving and wearing team jerseys on campus. Sadly, they lost to rival Yale University.

Canadian by birth, ironically, Jones can't skate and never followed pro or college hockey before moving to the states 10 years ago.

"My father used to say, 'I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out,'" Jones said. "I moved here and fell in love with college hockey. It's different than pro hockey because of the lack of fighting. When our hockey coach recruits players he looks for good students too. You wind up with a different game."

Jonesy, as he's known in the classroom, said that 22 out of 26 players on the hockey team major in business, and all are his advisees.

As a fan, he attends most games and makes a yearly road trip to the Dartmouth game with a group of seven other superfans, all professors from the business school, who've dubbed themselves "the Q."

"I can't tell you what Q stands for, or I'd have to kill you," Jones said laughing. "It's men being boys and loving their hockey team. You have to ask to join, like the Masons. We wear a Q ball cap with RTB 175 written on the inside. I can't tell you what that means, either."

The secret society has a special handshake, initiation and uses the occasion of the Dartmouth game to stay overnight and party.

"These are grown men with Ph.Ds," Jones deadpans. The Q also does a little fundraising for the team and for causes like cancer.

As a marketing professor, Jones finds fan behavior fascinating. It's a form of brand loyalty, but it differs from buying a BMW whose quality and benefits are consistent over time.

"With a sports team, that quality and those benefits are not consistent," Jones said. "You're on an emotional rollercoaster. You are loyal -- you are with them in a losing season. You cheer for every goal just as if they are winning the championship."

Beyond school spirit – fans form a sea of yellow shirts in the stands, wave yellow foam flags – Quinnipiac and other colleges see tangible benefits when sports teams do well and thus have a strong fan base.

Last year, some 20,000 students applied for an undergraduate spot, and that number is expected to increase to 25,000 in part because of the excellence of its sports teams, said Nicholas Wormley, associate vice president for alumni and parent development at Quinnipiac.

Connecticut loves to bemoan the lack of professional sports here and spends a lot of time arguing over New York and Boston teams. In my house, it's a certain pinstriped baseball team that is the One Who Shall Not Be Named.

But we can all agree that we love our college teams, whose members might even be the kid next door.